


The Vagra Incident

by LyraNgalia



Category: Sherlock (TV), Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Alternate Universe, Brotp, F/M, Gen, Skin of Evil, Star Trek: TNG
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:17:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyraNgalia/pseuds/LyraNgalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After an away mission gone awry, one Doctor John Watson of the Starship Enterprise attempts to get his friend, one Lieutenant Commander Sherlock Holmes, to understand the price of a human life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vagra Incident

**Author's Note:**

> For an anonymous requester on Tumblr who asked for a Sherlock Star Trek AU. I suspect the anon probably meant reboot!Trek AU, but playing with Sherlock and John as Data and Geordi was just too much fun for me to resist.

While his fellow crewmen were too polite (afraid) to say anything within his earshot, Sherlock knew what they called him when they thought he could not hear. It was, after all, obvious. And secrets were hard to keep on a ship the size of the Enterprise. So he knew what the crew called him. The brilliant Lieutenant Commander Sherlock Holmes to his face. The android, the unfeeling machine behind his back.

John told them off, of course. Doctor John Watson, second in command of the Enterprise’s medical staff. Half the crew didn’t listen to him, the other half simply kept their comments out of _both_ officers’ earshot. Still, Sherlock knew that, despite John’s friendship, despite John’s attempts to _normalize_ him with the crew, that there was a part of John that wondered if the whispers were right. It was that part now that was watching him, watching him spin the chip between his fingers. Sherlock could see it, see it as easily as he could see that John had been to see the counselor. That Dr. Crusher had set John on a new set of experiments (no doubt the Nycrodian spore cells from the last away mission). That he and Commander had had a round of drinks last night at Ten Forward. He could read it in John, that wondering whether or not Sherlock felt anything at all, whether or not he would play the message on the translucent chip.

Sherlock wished he knew himself. Ensign Adler had been… an enigma, a puzzle, a locked box he could not solve, but one who had been _there_ on the Enterprise. And now she… wasn’t. Would never be again. The captain had done the honours, released what was left of her body into the nearby sun. Privately, Sherlock thought a supernova would have been more appropriate, given the depth of frustration Irene Adler inspired in him, but there were no supernovas nearby, and to divert the entire ship simply to find one for one woman’s remains was an irresponsible waste of resources.

Still, Sherlock stared at the chip in his hand, and found himself wanting to tell it that he wished they had found the supernova. Rubbish, of course, to talk to a bloody chip. She was dead. A body now incinerated. It wasn’t as if she could hear him.

“Well, are you going to listen to it?” John’s question (Sherlock had expected he’d ask at the two minute and fifteen second point, he’d waited until two minutes and twenty seven seconds) broke through Sherlock’s thoughts and Sherlock turned to stare at him.

He wish he knew.

“Why should I?” Sherlock heard the flatness of his own voice, the lack of emotion that made him so utterly different from the other members of the crew. (The unthinking machine. The android who can’t feel.) “She’s dead. Listening to it won’t change anything.”

John opened his mouth, thought, closed it again. Out of words. Sherlock did that to him regularly. He thought, opened his mouth again, and shook his head, sighing. “Well, it’s yours. It isn’t my business what you do with it.” He rose from the table, and reached over, as if to pat Sherlock on the shoulder. Thought better of it again, brushed off the front of his uniform, and straightened, heading for the door. “Holodeck tomorrow?”

Sherlock nodded, still staring at the chip. “0730.” The door swished open, then closed, behind John.

Minutes ticked by, punctuated by the sound of air recycling through his quarters and the half turns of the chip that Sherlock gave every 43 seconds. Finally, he set the chip into the console, and commanded, “Computer, play message alpha.”

A shimmering hologram, about three inches tall, appeared on the table in front of him. Ensign Irene Adler, her hair in an elaborate twist on her head, wrought in miniature, her skin and smirking lips nothing but photons, just as her body was now nothing but atoms. She had recorded it sitting, her feet tucked up underneath her. She looked up at him, the hologram’s eyes somehow unerringly finding his. He suspected she programmed it that way. He refused to think she knew him well enough to know where to look.

“If you’re hearing this, Sherlock, then I suppose that means I’m dead. No doubt you’d tell me it was my own fault…”

His hand clenched. The crew had been, unsurprisingly, wrong about the machine.

 


End file.
